To Battle Fake News, Ukrainian Show Features Nothing but Lies Russia, though, has been such a fountain of fake news inside Ukraine that debunking factual errors in Russian propaganda became the specialty of StopFake. In 2014, Russia’s state-owned Channel 1 broadcast a now infamous report that Ukrainian nationalists had crucified a Russian child on the central square in Slovyansk after the Ukrainian Army expelled Russian-backed separatists from the town. Yevhen Fedchenko, a journalism professor at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, helped start StopFake in March 2014 to heighten public awareness of Russian misinformation at the peak of the Ukraine crisis. German propagandists in World War I first used the story line, claiming that the British were crucifying German soldiers, he said, and it has been a staple of European war propaganda since. Recurring themes emerged, becoming the talk at water coolers around the capital: An Islamic State training camp had opened in Ukraine; President Petro O. Poroshenko was a drunk and sometimes appeared inebriated in public; nationalists had taken to lynching or, in one infamous case, crucifying Russian-speaking children. "It is investigative journalism, with a twist." The journalism department at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy oversees the program and provides the basement television studio where, once a week, all the lies are gathered in one place. Oksana Syroyid said that fo
